Politically Unstable: The MAHA movement is essential for public health

Video

Saturday, September 20, 2025

OPINION:

Diana Lufti, health care policy expert and founder of the Healing Science Policy Institute, joins Kelly Sadler on Politically Unstable to discuss the importance of the ’Make America Healthy Again’ movement and what needs to change in the science industry to restore public trust.

[SADLER] There’s been a lot of debate on Capitol Hill this week. And there’ll be much debate moving forward as RFK Jr. looks to roll out his MAHA strategy. He was under attack by Senate Democrats, calling his approach to science unscientific. And they’re upset with what they perceive as chaos at the CDC, with the CDC director being fired a few weeks ago, and then mass resignations as RFK Jr. looks to hire the people that support his agenda and roll it out.

So, Diana, talk to me about your column. What prompted you to write it? And explain science versus science here.

[LUFTI] What prompted the column, actually, was what prompted this original movement to begin with, which was that science is at war and it’s actually always been at war. There’s mainline consensus on certain types of topics and you can practically question all sorts of things except for very specific issues that automatically get labeled as pseudoscience or anti-science. And that pertains directly and very specifically to vaccines but almost everything that is the scientific application that goes into healthcare and medicine, that also gets labeled as pseudoscience and anti-science and so the two differences when people say science — science is a tool and scientists actually debate all the time. The problem is whether or not a particular view or a particular interpretation of science is essentially pushed.

There is no such thing as science being apolitical. It is political, but it’s political in a different way.

[SADLER] Explain that. What do you mean political in a different way? Because, you know, I think before COVID, there was consensus, or people didn’t know what the CDC did. They weren’t following what the FDA was approving or not approving. They just went along to get along. But at the same time, we were seeing that our children were getting more obese and coming down with illnesses like ADHD and their health was generally declining. We’ve seen younger women get breast cancer at numbers and rates that we’ve never seen previously. And we all, I think, we’re collectively questioning why this is, or what are we doing as a society, why are we all getting sicker, right?

But we accepted, I believe, the mainstream version of what the CDC, the HHS, it was all working for us. Then COVID happened. And with COVID, everything that came out of those government bodies were lies. And RFK Jr. put it very eloquently this week. We were told the vaccine was going to protect us from contracting or spreading the disease. That was false. They said that cloth masks would protect us. That was false. They said that we had to be six feet away from interacting with human beings. And that was based on absolutely no data whatsoever coming out of these bodies. So describe to me how you got on board the MAHA movement.

There’s alternative natural healing methods that are actually put down, put below as a society where they value the vaccines and whatnot, and kind of put down these other methods because they don’t make the pharmaceutical industry any money.

[LUFTI] Yes, and also because I think on the issue of scientists coming together, anytime someone actually comes up with a discovery, anything new in the field, whether that’s “here’s what’s actually causing inflammation, here’s what’s causing chronic illnesses, here’s what’s essentially killing the human body,” they get shut down. So they’ve actually been there and there’s some credible, amazing scientists at both the NIH as well as throughout like our academic medical institutions. As soon as they start saying that perhaps what we’re doing is wrong. They get shut down. They get silenced.